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When even the most invested in the crypto bubble are skeptical, you should stay well away. This sounds like the blockchain equivalent of pets.com, the hype infl

When even the most invested in the crypto bubble are skeptical, you should stay well away. This sounds like the blockchain equivalent of pets.com, the hype inflection point: >“It’s a pitch that sounds good to V.C.s that haven’t participated but makes no sense to people that have been in the space,” said Nick Tomaino, the founder of a virtual currency investment fund, 1confirmation, that didn’t invest in Telegram. >The most obvious reason to be skeptical of the project is that there is not even a prototype — just a 132-page paper promising what the system will look like one day. The Telegram team is promising to release the software late this year or next year. >What’s more, Telegram is promising to do more than any other virtual currency and to fix the intractable problems that have plagued virtual currencies like Bitcoin, such as overcoming the network’s difficulty handling all the transactions that have poured onto the network as it has become more popular. >An analyst at one virtual currency-focused hedge fund, Pantera Capital, wrote a scathing essay noting that the Telegram team has given no evidence that they will be able to solve the problems that have dogged everyone else. >“I cannot, in 132 pages, gain the slightest intuition as to how to go about proving that the hard problems it needs to solve will be solved,” the analyst, Charles Noyes, wrote about the Telegram project on Medium.

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goptimize 9y ago
They invested in competitors
- geofft 9y ago
  So? Isn't that evidence that they're genuine in their belief that Telegram won't succeed?
  - goptimize 9y ago
    They did it before Telegram ICO was announced so it is not an evidence. Now, they have no other financially profitable choice but to make FUD to increase the likelihood of Telegram's fail. I don't say it is bad, it is just a better description of the events.
    - xwvvvvwx 9y ago
      FUD == Facts U Dislike
      - goptimize 9y ago
        FUD is a way to make money from uninformed public which still apparently has some money
htormey 9y ago
I wouldn’t be so quick to write the telegram team off. Most of the existing players in crypto have a vested interest in seeing them fail. On the one hand the Telegram team have a solid track record & a lot of users: They produced a high quality app that’s used by hundreds of millions of users. Also add to that the fact that more of the crypto chat related channels are on telegram. On the other hand if you read through the white paper they put out, they give a timeline that promiss to do everything from wallets, to distributed file storage/computing/exchanges. That’s a very high bar to set without providing a lot of technical details. A leaked copy of the white paper can be read here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ucUeKg_NiR8RxNAonb8Q55jZha03WC0O/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ucUeKg_NiR8RxNAonb8Q55jZha0... Personally I think it’s worth taking a small bet on them. The biggest problem in crypto right now is a lack of widely used consumer apps. Getting hundreds of millions of people to use an app is a harder than solving some of the distributed systems problems facing crypto right now in my book. I could see the telegram team pulling this off.
- tfha 9y ago
  You can see the telegram team pulling this off because you aren't in the crypto space. They are claiming to be able to solve open research problems that some of the best minds in the world have been studying for years, and don't have an answer to. This isn't a matter of one startup failing where another stands a chance. The problems that Telegram is proposing they can solve aren't execution problems. They are unsolved research problems. And some of those problems (like verifiable computing) have been actively researched for decades, well pre-dating cryptocurrency and Bitcoin. Everybody has blinders on.
  - htormey 9y ago
    “You can see the telegram team pulling this off because you aren't in the crypto space. They are claiming to be able to solve open research problems that some of the best minds in the world have been studying for years, and don't have an answer to.” Do you want to be specific? I suppose one question is do they need to pull off everything they claim in the whitepaper in order to be successful? Do you feel the things the Telegram team promise are an all or nothing deal. If they just had hundreds of millions of people using Telegram for payments and perhaps filestorage/bots backed by crypto could they do that without all the things promised in the white paper? Would the market consider that a success and would that be reflected in the currencies price?

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[deleted]

goptimize 9y ago

They invested in competitors

geofft 9y ago
So? Isn't that evidence that they're genuine in their belief that Telegram won't succeed?
- goptimize 9y ago
  They did it before Telegram ICO was announced so it is not an evidence. Now, they have no other financially profitable choice but to make FUD to increase the likelihood of Telegram's fail. I don't say it is bad, it is just a better description of the events.
  - xwvvvvwx 9y ago
    FUD == Facts U Dislike
    - goptimize 9y ago
      FUD is a way to make money from uninformed public which still apparently has some money

htormey 9y ago

I wouldn’t be so quick to write the telegram team off. Most of the existing players in crypto have a vested interest in seeing them fail. On the one hand the Telegram team have a solid track record & a lot of users: They produced a high quality app that’s used by hundreds of millions of users. Also add to that the fact that more of the crypto chat related channels are on telegram. On the other hand if you read through the white paper they put out, they give a timeline that promiss to do everything from wallets, to distributed file storage/computing/exchanges. That’s a very high bar to set without providing a lot of technical details. A leaked copy of the white paper can be read here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ucUeKg_NiR8RxNAonb8Q55jZha03WC0O/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ucUeKg_NiR8RxNAonb8Q55jZha0... Personally I think it’s worth taking a small bet on them. The biggest problem in crypto right now is a lack of widely used consumer apps. Getting hundreds of millions of people to use an app is a harder than solving some of the distributed systems problems facing crypto right now in my book. I could see the telegram team pulling this off.

tfha 9y ago
You can see the telegram team pulling this off because you aren't in the crypto space. They are claiming to be able to solve open research problems that some of the best minds in the world have been studying for years, and don't have an answer to. This isn't a matter of one startup failing where another stands a chance. The problems that Telegram is proposing they can solve aren't execution problems. They are unsolved research problems. And some of those problems (like verifiable computing) have been actively researched for decades, well pre-dating cryptocurrency and Bitcoin. Everybody has blinders on.
- htormey 9y ago
  “You can see the telegram team pulling this off because you aren't in the crypto space. They are claiming to be able to solve open research problems that some of the best minds in the world have been studying for years, and don't have an answer to.” Do you want to be specific? I suppose one question is do they need to pull off everything they claim in the whitepaper in order to be successful? Do you feel the things the Telegram team promise are an all or nothing deal. If they just had hundreds of millions of people using Telegram for payments and perhaps filestorage/bots backed by crypto could they do that without all the things promised in the white paper? Would the market consider that a success and would that be reflected in the currencies price?